The Man With The Perfect Palate.

Several months ago, Robert M. Parker Jr., the single most influential person in the wine industry announced his resignation and retirement from the Wine Advocate, a company he founded in 1978. 

If you are a wine enthusiast (of any level) and are unaware who Robert M. Parker Jr is, then this is your opportunity to get up to speed. Quite simply, the wines you enjoy, particularly reds, can be traced, stylistically, to Parker’s singular influence.

If your wine-buying method targets 90+ rated wines (or equivalent “star” methods), it’s derived from Parker’s 100 point system.  It is really a 50 point system, for he gives 50 base points for simply showing up. Forty points are then assessed for depth and intensity in all aspects of appearance (color), aroma and flavor, plus he gives ten points, at the end, for “overall quality and potential to improve with aging.”  These are the make or break points that separate the good wines from the great. 

After being beguiled with wine while travelling in France in 1967 with his wife to be, Parker returned to eventually develop and test the acceptance of his grading system via a direct mail approach.  Prior to that, most wine buyers relied on local retailers or lifestyle magazine articles, typically uncritical and written by one with a wine industry connection who just spent a weekend of wining and dining at a host Chateau. 


With that lack of transparency and Parker’s admiration for consumer advocate Ralph Nader’s efforts, he decided to offer the general public an alternate, more consumer friendly approach; numerically based wine reviews; from one with no wine trade connections; who accepts no advertising or gifts; who acquires the wines at his own expense; and who is only one that performs the tastings (that changed in later years). 

To test his idea, he acquired customer mailing lists from wine shops, and mailed them a free copy.  Six hundred signed up for the second issue, and The Wine Advocate was born. In 1984 he resigned his job as legal counsel for a government sponsored entity, and turned completely to writing, which has been prodigious and profitable.

Besides his bimonthly newsletter, from which he leveraged many successful, oversized, wine-buying guides, he wrote brief articles for selected food/wine magazines and published detailed, widely translated, authoritative books on Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Rhone Valley.

With his rating system, there was no need to understand the intricacies of appellations and/or the best producers therein. What one did know was, if the wine was rated 90 to 95 (Outstanding), or 96 to 100 (Extraordinary), it was something worth seeking out.  Despite numerous journalistic criticisms, his system prevailed, and all other critics and magazines either converted or combined it with their own proprietary systems. 

His breakout into worldwide visibility and acceptance was triggered by the 1982 Bordeaux vintage. Most critics were negative on it.  They asserted it was a hot weather anomaly, rather atypical.  Parker, on the other hand, saw it differently; he fully embraced it, and became its leading proponent.

And why not?  It was a perfect template overlay of his rating system: gobs of rich, ripe fruit; deep, dark, dense colors; intense aromatics and long lasting flavors. Parker described the wines in such glowing, evocative terms that it was nearly impossible for anyone to resist buying some of the 1982s.  His subscriber list increased accordingly. 

As one businessman uttered long ago, “Find a need, and fill it.”  The man with the perfect palate did just that, and along the way his efforts not only assisted the wine buying public, but it also changed the way grapes were grown, how wines were crafted and how they were promoted and marketed.

Seven years ago Parker sold a substantial portion of his company to Singapore investors, Michelin later picked up forty percent.  No figures have been revealed, but you can rest assured, as an avowed hedonist, he will be eating and drinking the finest for as long as he wants.